Longtermism is the view that the most urgent global priorities, and those to which we should devote the largest portion of our resources, are those that focus on (i) ensuring a long future for humanity, and perhaps sentient or intelligent life more generally, and (ii) improving the quality of the lives that inhabit that long future. While it is by no means the only one, the argument most commonly given for this conclusion is that these interventions have greater expected goodness (...) per unit of resource devoted to them than each of the other available interventions, including those that focus on the health and well-being of the current population. In this paper, I argue that, even if we grant the consequentialist ethics upon which this argument depends, and even if we grant one of the axiologies that are typically paired with that ethics to give the argument, we are not morally required to choose an option that maximises expected utility; indeed, we might not even be permitted to do so. Instead, I will argue, if the argument's consequentialism is correct, we should choose using a decision theory that is sensitive to risk, and allows us to give greater weight to worse-case outcomes than expected utility theory does. And, I will show, such decision theories do not always recommend longtermist interventions. Indeed, sometimes, they recommend exactly the opposite: sometimes, they recommend hastening human extinction. Many, though not all, will take this as a reductio of the consequentialism or the axiology of the argument. I remain agnostic on the conclusion we should draw. (shrink)

A growing number of decision theorists have, in recent years, defended the view that rationality is permissive under risk: Different rational agents may be more or less risk-averse or risk-inclined. This can result in them making different choices under risk even if they value outcomes in exactly the same way. One pressing question that arises once we grant such permissiveness is what attitude to risk we should implement when choosing on behalf of other people. Are we permitted to implement any (...) of the rationally permissible risk attitudes, is there some specific risk attitude that is required when choosing for others, or are we required to defer to the risk attitudes of the people on whose behalf we are choosing? This article elaborates on this question, explains its wider practical and theoretical significance, provides an overview of existing answers, and explores how to go about providing a more systematic account of how to choose on behalf of others in risky contexts. (shrink)

This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several “calibration dilemmas,” in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities. We first lay out a series of such dilemmas for prioritarian theories. We then consider a widely endorsed family of egalitarian views and show that they are subject to even more forceful calibration dilemmas than prioritarian theories. Finally, (...) we show that our results challenge common utilitarian accounts of the badness of inequalities in resources. (shrink)

No existing normative decision theory adequately handles risk. Expected Utility Theory is overly restrictive in prohibiting a range of reasonable preferences. And theories designed to accommodate such preferences (for example, Buchak's (2013) Risk‐Weighted Expected Utility Theory) violate the Betweenness axiom, which requires that you are indifferent to randomizing over two options between which you are already indifferent. Betweenness has been overlooked by philosophers, and we argue that it is a compelling normative constraint. Furthermore, neither Expected nor Risk‐Weighted Expected Utility Theory (...) allow for stakes‐sensitive risk‐attitudes—they require that risk matters in the same way whether you are gambling for loose change or millions of dollars. We provide a novel normative interpretation of Weighted‐Linear Utility Theory that solves all of these problems. (shrink)

Lara Buchak argues for a version of rank-weighted utilitarianism that assigns greater weight to the interests of the worse off. She argues that our distributive principles should be derived from the preferences of rational individuals behind a veil of ignorance, who ought to be risk averse. I argue that Buchak’s appeal to the veil of ignorance leads to a particular way of extending rank-weighted utilitarianism to the evaluation of uncertain prospects. This method recommends choices that violate the unanimous preferences of (...) rational individuals and choices that guarantee worse distributions. These results, I suggest, undermine Buchak’s argument for rank-weighted utilitarianism. (shrink)

The veil of ignorance argument was used by John C. Harsanyi to defend Utilitarianism and by John Rawls to defend the absolute priority of the worst off. In a recent paper, Lara Buchak revives the veil of ignorance argument, and uses it to defend an intermediate position between Harsanyi's and Rawls' that she calls Relative Prioritarianism. None of these authors explore the implications of allowing that agent's behind the veil are averse to ambiguity. Allowing for aversion to ambiguity---which is both (...) the most commonly observed and a seemingly reasonable attitude to ambiguity---however supports a version of Egalitarianism, whose logical form is quite different from the theories defended by the aforementioned authors. Moreover, it turns out that the veil of ignorance argument neither supports standard Utilitarianism nor Prioritarianism unless we assume that rational people are insensitive to ambiguity. (shrink)

This paper develops a form of moral actualism that can explain the procreative asymmetry. Along the way, it defends and explains the attractive asymmetry: the claim that although an impermissible option can be self-conditionally permissible, a permissible option cannot be self-conditionally impermissible.

Suppose we want to do the most good we can with a particular sum of money, but we cannot be certain of the consequences of different ways of making use of it. This article explores how our attitudes towards risk and ambiguity bear on what we should do. It shows that risk-avoidance and ambiguity-aversion can each provide good reason to divide our money between various charitable organizations rather than to give it all to the most promising one. It also shows (...) how different attitudes towards risk and ambiguity affect whether we should give to an organization which does a small amount of good for certain or to one which does a large amount of good with some small or unknown probability. (shrink)

Some moral theories tell you, in some situations in which you are interacting with a group of people, to avoid acting in the way that is expectedly best for everybody. This essay argues that such theories are mistaken. Go ahead and do what is expectedly best for everybody. The argument is based on the thought that when interacting with an individual it is fine for you to act in the expected interests of the individual and that many interactions with individuals (...) may compose an interaction with a group. (shrink)

Prioritarianism is a moral view that ranks outcomes according to the sum of a strictly increasing and strictly concave transformation of individual well-being. Prioritarianism is ‘welfarist’ (namel...

This paper examines a recent argument in favour of strong precautionary action—possibly including working to hasten human extinction—on the basis of a decision-theoretic view that accommodates the risk-attitudes of all affected while giving more weight to the more risk-averse attitudes. First, we dispute the need to take into account other people’s attitudes towards risk at all. Second we argue that a version of the non-identity problem undermines the case for doing so in the context of future people. Lastly, we suggest (...) that we should not work to hasten human extinction, even if significant risk aversion is warranted. (shrink)

How should we choose on behalf of groups of agents who violate expected utility theory by being risk averse or risk seeking? Unfortunately, we sometimes have to choose either acts that everyone disprefers or acts that are sure to turn out worse than another act. This observation is particularly troubling for risk-expected utility theorists: neither option sits comfortably with their view.

How should an impartial social observer judge distributions of well-being across different individuals when there is uncertainty regarding the state of the world? I explore this question by imposing very weak conditions of rationality and benevolent sympathy on impartial betterness judgments under uncertainty. Although weak enough to be consistent with all the main theories of rationality, these conditions prove to be sufficient to rule out any heterogeneity in what is good for individuals, to require a neutral attitude to uncertainty on (...) the part of the social observer, and to require that both individual and social betterness be strongly separable. (shrink)

I defend a weak version of the Pigou-Dalton principle for chances. The principle says that it is better to increase the survival chance of a person who is more likely to die rather than a person who is less likely to die, assuming that the two people do not differ in any other morally relevant respect. The principle justifies plausible moral judgements that standard ex post views, such as prioritarianism and rank-dependent egalitarianism, cannot accommodate. However, the principle can be justified (...) by the same reasoning that has recently been used to defend the core axiom of ex post prioritarianism and egalitarianism, namely, Pigou-Dalton for well-being. The arguably biggest challenge for proponents of Pigou-Dalton for chances is that it violates State Dominance for social prospects. However, I argue that we have independent reason for rejecting State Dominance for social prospects, since it prevents a social planner from properly respecting people's preferences. (shrink)

I discuss the trilemma that consists of the following three principles being inconsistent: 1. The Common Principle: if one distribution, A, necessarily brings a higher total sum of personal value that is distributed in a more egalitarian way than another distribution, B, A is more valuable than B. 2. (Weak) ex-ante Pareto: if one uncertain distribution, A, is more valuable than another uncertain distribution, B, for each patient, A is more valuable than B. 3. Pluralism about attitudes to risk (Pluralism): (...) the personal value of a prospect is a weighted sum of the values of the prospect’s outcomes, but the weight each outcome gets might be different from the probability the prospect assigns to the outcome. (shrink)

This essay argues that when setting climate policy, we should place more weight on worse possible consequences of a policy, while still placing some weight on better possible consequences. The argument proceeds by elucidating the range of attitudes people can take towards risk, how we must make choices for people when we don’t know their risk-attitudes, and the situation we are in with respect to climate policy and the consequences for future people. The result is an alternative to the Precautionary (...) Principle, an alternative that gives similar policy recommendations in many cases but is also sensitive to the costs of precautions. (shrink)

This paper studies the relationship between promoting people's welfare and respecting their autonomy of choice under risk. I highlight a conflict between these two aims. Given compelling assumptions, welfarists end up disregarding people's unanimous preference, even when everyone involved is entirely rational and only concerned with maximizing their own welfare. Non-welfarist theories of social choice are then considered. They are shown to face difficulties, too: either they fail to respect the value of welfare in at least one important sense, or (...) they end up prioritizing different people's welfare differently in non-risky choices, on the basis of their attitudes to risk, which are intuitively irrelevant in this context. (shrink)

Certain ethical views hold that we should pay more attention, even exclusive attention, to the worst-case scenario. Prominent examples include Rawls's Difference Principle and the Precautionary Principle. These views can be anchored in formal principles of decision theory, in two different ways. On the one hand, they can rely on ambiguity-aversion: the idea that we cannot assign sharp probabilities to various scenarios, and that if we cannot assign sharp probabilities, we should decide pessimistically, as if the probabilities are unfavorable. On (...) the other hand, they can rely on risk-avoidance: the idea that we should pay more attention to worse scenarios, even when we can assign sharp probabilities. I distinguish these two foundations. I also show how they can be modified to support versions of these views that pay more but not exclusive attention to worst-case scenarios. Finally, I argue that risk-avoidance provides a superior foundation than ambiguity-aversion for the Difference Principle and the Precautionary Principle; in particular, it correctly identifies which ethical facts should matter to those who champion these principles. (shrink)

When our choice affects some other person and the outcome is unknown, it has been argued that we should defer to their risk attitude, if known, or else default to use of a risk‐avoidant risk function. This, in turn, has been claimed to require the use of a risk‐avoidant risk function when making decisions that primarily affect future people, and to decrease the desirability of efforts to prevent human extinction, owing to the significant risks associated with continued human survival. I (...) raise objections to the claim that respect for others' risk attitudes requires risk‐avoidance when choosing for future generations. In particular, I argue that there is no known principle of interpersonal aggregation that yields acceptable results in variable population contexts and is consistent with a plausible ideal of respect for others' risk attitudes in fixed population cases. (shrink)

Three philosophical accounts of risk dominate the contemporary literature. On the probabilistic account, risk has to do with the probability of a disvaluable event obtaining; on the modal account, it has to do with the modal closeness of that event obtaining; on the normic account, it has to do with the normalcy of that event obtaining. The debate between these accounts has proceeded via counterexample-trading, with each account having some cases it explains better than others, and some cases that it (...) cannot explain at all. In this article, we attempt to break the impasse between the three accounts of risk through a shift in methodology. We investigate the concept of risk via the method of conceptual reverse-engineering, whereby a theorist reconstructs the need that a concept serves for a group of agents in order to illuminate the shape of the concept: its intension and extension. We suggest that risk functions to meet our need to make decisions that reduce disvalue under conditions of uncertainty. Our project makes plausible that risk is a pluralist concept: meeting this need requires that risk takes different forms in different contexts. But our pluralism is principled: each of these different forms are part of one and the same concept, that has a ‘core-to-periphery’ structure, where the form the concept takes in typical cases (at its ‘core’) explains the form it takes in less typical cases (at its ‘periphery’). We then apply our findings to epistemic risk, to resolve an ambiguity in how ‘epistemic risk’ is standardly understood. (shrink)

Utilitarianism, it has been said, is not sensitive to the distribution of welfare. In making risky decisions for others there are multiple sensitivities at work. I present examples of risky decision-making involving drug allocations, charitable giving, breast-cancer screening and C-sections. In each of these examples there is a different sensitivity at work that pulls away from the utilitarian prescription. Instances of saving fewer people at a greater risk to many is more complex because there are two distributional sensitivities at work (...) that pull in opposite directions from the utilitarian calculus. I discuss objections to these sensitivities and conclude with some reflections on the value of formal modelling in thinking about societal risk. (shrink)

The original position together with the veil of ignorance have served as one of the main methodological devices to justify principles of distributive justice. Most approaches to this topic have primarily focused on the single person decision-theoretic aspect of the original position. This paper, in contrast, will directly model the basic structure and the economic agents therein to project the economic consequences and social outcomes generated either by utilitarianism or Rawls’s two principles of justice. It will be shown that when (...) the differences in people’s productive abilities are sufficiently great, utilitarianism dominates Rawls’s two principles of justice by providing a higher level of overall well-being to every member of society. Whenever this is the case, the parties can rely on the Principle of Dominance (which is a direct implication of instrumental rationality) to choose utilitarianism over Rawls’s two principles of justice. Furthermore, when this is so, utilitarianism is free from one of its most fundamental criticisms that it ‘does not take seriously the distinction between persons’ (Rawls 1971 [1999]: 24). (shrink)

Lara Buchak argues that her version of rank-weighted utilitarianism can accommodate an implication of the separateness of persons known as “the shift,” since it requires individuals to be more willing to accept risk for themselves than to accept inequality in society. I argue that this is mistaken. Buchak’s model fails to yield the shift when the decision-maker is distinct from the affected individual, as well as in certain social decisions where the risk attitude of the group is known. These findings (...) suggest that models which derive social choice rules from individual decision rules will generally fail to uphold separateness. (shrink)

How should we choose on behalf of people with different attitudes to risk? Simon Blessenohl has recently argued that this question poses a dilemma: it seems that sometimes we must choose either acts that everyone disprefers or else acts that are sure to turn out worse than some other act. In this article, I offer a complaints-centered account of how to take people’s attitudes to risk into consideration in our decision-making, and then I show that it provides a way out (...) of Blessenohl’s dilemma. (shrink)

This paper shows that versions of prioritarianism that focus at least partially on well-being levels at certain times conflict with conventional views of prudential value and prudential rationality. So-called timeslice prioritarianism, and pluralist views that ascribe importance to timeslices, hold that a benefit matters more, the worse off the beneficiary is at the time of receiving it. We show that views that evaluate outcomes in accordance with this idea entail that an agent who delays gratification makes an outcome worse, even (...) if it is better for the agent and worse for no one else. We take this to show that timeslice prioritarianism and some pluralist views violate Weak Pareto, and we argue that these versions of prioritarianism are implausible. (shrink)

Ramsey (1926) sketches a proposal for measuring the subjective probabilities of an agent by their observable preferences, assuming that the agent is an expected utility maximizer. I show how to extend the spirit of Ramsey's method to a strictly wider class of agents: risk-weighted expected utility maximizers (Buchak 2013). In particular, I show how we can measure the risk attitudes of an agent by their observable preferences, assuming that the agent is a risk-weighted expected utility maximizer. Further, we can leverage (...) this method to measure the subjective probabilities of a risk-weighted expected utility maximizer. (shrink)

This paper combines considerations from ethics, medicine and public health policy to articulate and defend a systematic case for mask wearing mandates (MWM). The paper argues for two main claims of general interest in favour of MWM. First, MWM provide a more effective, just and fair way to tackle the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic than policy alternatives such as laissez-faire approaches, mask wearing recommendations and physical distancing measures. And second, the proffered objections against MWM may justify some exemptions for specific categories (...) of individuals, but do not cast doubt on the justifiability of these mandates. Hence, unless some novel decisive objections are put forward against MWM, governments should adopt MWM. (shrink)

Is the overall value of a world just the sum of values contributed by each value-bearing entity in that world? Additively separable axiologies (like total utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and critical level views) say 'yes', but non-additive axiologies (like average utilitarianism, rank-discounted utilitarianism, and variable value views) say 'no'. This distinction appears to be practically important: among other things, additive axiologies generally assign great importance to large changes in population size, and therefore tend to strongly prioritize the long-term survival of humanity over (...) the interests of the present generation. Non-additive axiologies, on the other hand, need not assign great importance to large changes in population size. We show, however, that when there is a large enough `background population' unaffected by our choices, a wide range of non-additive axiologies converge in their implications with additive axiologies—for instance, average utilitarianism converges with critical-level utilitarianism and various egalitarian theories converge with prioritarianism. We further argue that real-world background populations may be large enough to make these limit results practically significant. This means that arguments from the scale of potential future populations for the astronomical importance of avoiding existential catastrophe, and other arguments in practical ethics that seem to presuppose additive separability, may succeed in practice whether or not we accept additive separability as a basic axiological principle. (shrink)

This thesis defends utilitarianism: the view that as far as morality goes, one ought to choose the option which will result in the most overall well-being. Utilitarianism is widely rejected by philosophers today, largely because of a number of influential objections. In this thesis I deal with three of them. Each is found in Bernard Williams’s ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’ (1973). The first is the Integrity Objection, an intervention that has been influential whilst being subject to a wide variety of (...) interpretations. In Chapter Two I give my interpretation of Williams’s Integrity objection; in Chapter Three I discuss one common response to it, and in Chapters Four and Five I give my own defence of utilitarianism against it. In Chapter Six I discuss a second objection: the problem of pre-emption. This problem is also found in Williams, but has received greater attention through the work of other authors in recent years. It suggests that utilitarianism is unable to deal with some of the modern world’s most pressing moral problems, and raises an internal tension between the twin utilitarian aims of making a difference and achieving the best outcomes. In Chapter Seven I discuss a third objection: that utilitarianism is insufficiently egalitarian. I find this claim to be unwarranted, in light of recent social science and philosophy. My responses to Williams’s objections draw upon resources from the socialist tradition – in particular, that tradition’s emphasis on the importance of social connections between individuals. Socialists have often been hostile to utilitarianism, in part for socialist-inflected versions of Williams’s objections. Thus, in responding to these objections I aim to demonstrate that socialist thought contains the means to defuse not only mainstream philosophy’s rejection of utilitarianism but also its own, and thus to re-open the possibilities for a productive engagement between the two traditions. (shrink)

I evaluate two contractualist approaches to the ethics of risk: mutual constraint and the probabilistic, ex ante approach. After explaining how these approaches address problems in earlier interpretations of contractualism, I object that they fail to respond to diverse risk preferences in populations. Some people could reasonably reject the risk thresholds associated with these approaches. A strategy for addressing this objection is considering individual risk preferences, similar to those Buchak discusses concerning expected-utility approaches to risk. I defend the risk-preferences-adjusted contractualist (...) approach, which calculates a population’s average risk preference and permits risk thresholds below that preference, only. (shrink)

Suppose an agent is choosing between rescuing more people with a lower probability of success, and rescuing fewer with a higher probability of success. How should they choose? Our moral judgments about such cases are not well-studied, unlike the closely analogous non-moral preferences over monetary gambles. In this paper, I present an empirical study which aims to elicit the moral analogues of our risk preferences, and to assess whether one kind of evidence—concerning how they depend on outcome probabilities—can debunk them. (...) I find significant heterogeneity in our moral risk preferences—in particular, moral risk-seeking and risk-neutrality are surprisingly popular. I also find that subjects’ judgments aren't probability-dependent, thus providing an empirical defense against debunking arguments from probability dependence. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that even though egalitarianism and prioritarianism are different theories of social welfare, they can use the same social welfare measures. I present six different arguments for this thesis. The first argument is that conceptual connections between egalitarianism and prioritarianism ensure that any measure that works for either theory works for both. The second argument is that conditions necessary and sufficient to identify egalitarian and prioritarian measures, respectively, are equivalent. The third argument is that both egalitarianism (...) and prioritarianism can use two standard measures, typically proposed for only one theory. The fourth to sixth arguments contend that four properties that have been proposed as distinctive of either egalitarian or prioritarian measures cannot distinguish between them. I conclude that any egalitarian measure is also a prioritarian measure, and vice versa. (shrink)

How should policymakers respond to the risk of technological unemployment that automation brings? First, I develop a procedure for answering this question that consults, rather than usurps, individuals’ own attitudes and ambitions towards that risk. I call this the insurance argument. A distinctive virtue of this view is that it dispenses with the need to appeal to a class of controversial reasons about the value of employment, and so is consistent with the demands of liberal political morality. Second, I appeal (...) to the insurance argument to show that governments ought not simply to provide those who are displaced by machines with unemployment benefits. Instead, it must offer re-training programmes, as well as enact more general macroeconomic policies that create new opportunities for employment. My contribution is important not only because it helps us to resolve a series of urgent policy disputes—disputes that have been discussed extensively by labour market economists and policymakers, but less so by political philosophers—but also because my analysis sheds light on more general philosophical controversies relating to risk. (shrink)

John Rawls famously argued that the Difference Principle would be chosen by any rational agent in the original position. Derek Parfit and Philippe Van Parijs have claimed, contra Rawls, that it is not the Difference Principle which is implied by Rawls’ original position argument, but rather the more refined Lexical Difference Principle. In this paper, we study both principles in the context of social choice under ignorance. First, we present a general format for evaluating original position arguments in this context. (...) We argue that in this format, the Difference Principle can be specified in three conceptually distinct ways. We show that these three specifications give the same choice recommendations, and can be grounded in an original position argument in combination with the well-known maximin rule. Analogously, we argue that one can give at least four plausible specifications of the Lexical Difference Principle, which however turn out to give different recommendations in concrete choice scenarios. We prove that only one of these four specifications can be grounded in an original position argument. Moreover, this one specification seems the least appealing from the viewpoint of distributive justice. This insight points towards a general weakness of original position arguments. (shrink)

It is often said that consequentialism violates the separateness of persons. But what does this mean? Existing interpretations are often unclear, or let consequentialism off easy: because they target amendable parts of the consequentialist framework, they can be sidestepped by more subtle versions of the theory. Consequentialism's opponents, however, might hope for a stronger interpretation––one which suggests that the separateness of persons objection presses a distinct and powerful charge against consequentialist theory. This paper proposes such an interpretation. It starts from (...) the fact that, unlike other moral theories, consequentialism determines how to act by looking at features such as states of affairs or outcomes. Yet, crucially, states of affairs or outcomes often make reference to, or extend across, more than one person. Thus, they implicitly and necessarily group together different individuals. In the proposal of this paper, it is this part of consequentialism which violates the separateness of persons. (shrink)

Lara Buchak defends a Weight-Ranked Utilitarianism (WRU) that she says avoids the critique of Rawls’s that is sometimes thought fatal: utilitarianism unjustifiably blurs the distinction between persons. Buchak’s defence depends upon (i) a version of Harsanyi’s assumption that parties to a social contract should reason as if they have an equal chance of being anyone and (ii) a hypothesis she explores in a recent article. I argue that her assumption and hypothesis are untenable. WRU fails of the generality to which (...) Buchak aspires because it fails for one of her most important cases: the distributive question posed by Rawls. (shrink)

According to a common judgement, a social planner should often use a lottery to decide which of two people should receive a good. This judgement undermines one of the best-known arguments for utilitarianism, due to John C. Harsanyi, and more generally undermines axiomatic arguments for utilitarianism and similar views. In this paper we ask which combinations of views about (a) the social planner’s attitude to risk and inequality, and (b) the subjects’ attitudes to risk are consistent with the aforementioned judgement. (...) We find that the class of combinations of views that can plausibly accommodate this judgement is quite limited. But one theory does better than others: the theory of chance-sensitive utility. (shrink)

Epistemic states of uncertainty play important roles in ethical and political theorizing. Theories that appeal to a “veil of ignorance,” for example, analyze fairness or impartiality in terms of certain states of ignorance. It is important, then, to scrutinize proposed conceptions of ignorance and explore promising alternatives in such contexts. Here, I study Lerner’s probabilistic egalitarian theorem in the setting of imprecise probabilities. Lerner’s theorem assumes that a social planner tasked with distributing income to individuals in a population is “completely (...) ignorant” about which utility functions belong to which individuals. Lerner models this ignorance with a certain uniform probability distribution, and shows that, under certain further assumptions, income should be equally distributed. Much of the criticism of the relevance of Lerner’s result centers on the representation of ignorance involved. Imprecise probabilities provide a general framework for reasoning about various forms of uncertainty including, in particular, ignorance. To what extent can Lerner’s conclusion be maintained in this setting? (shrink)

We study original position arguments in the context of social choice under ignorance. First, we present a general formal framework for such arguments. Next, we provide an axiomatic characterization of social choice rules that can be supported by original position arguments. We illustrate this characterization in terms of various well-known social choice rules, some of which do and some of which do not satisfy the axioms in question. Depending on the perspective one takes, our results can be used to argue (...) against certain rules, against Rawlsian theories of procedural fairness, or in support of richer, multidimensional models of individual choice. (shrink)

A common view has it that since we are far likelier to be killed in some road or household accident than in a terror attack, our fear of the latter is exaggerated. I argue that terrorism's relatively limited death toll need not mean that fearing it is unreasonable, nor does it immediately imply that counter-terrorism policies are unjustified – whatever other, legitimate concerns these policies give rise to. First, I argue that in the special case of terrorism, it is misleading (...) to focus on risk per capita, as critics typically do. Second, while terrorism has a probabilistic component which should be relevant to decision-making, risk is not entirely or even primarily what terrorism is all about. Third, I argue that fearing terrorism may be reasonable even while recognizing the small probability of personal harm. Due to terrorism's random character, the belief that one will escape harm rests on little more than statistical evidence. As I explain, this leaves some room for reasonable doubt, and a justified level of fear. (shrink)

In my feature article in this issue, ‘Doctors, patients and risk attitudes’, I argue that considerations of both autonomy and beneficence support the practice of healthcare professionals deferring to their patients’ reflectively endorsed risk attitudes when making decisions under uncertainty.1 The commentaries written in response to this article present many interesting criticisms, limitations and applications of the view, and I am grateful to all of the commentators for their engagement with this topic. I cannot possibly do justice to all of (...) the points they have raised in this brief response, so I will address two common themes that appear in a number of the commentaries: first, whether the view I have proposed goes too far or not far enough in deferring to individual patients; and second, the epistemic challenge that would be faced when trying to put this approach into practice. Theoretical accounts of the link between preferences and either well-being or autonomy face a familiar tension: if well-being or autonomy are tied too closely to individuals’ actual preferences, one must contend with examples of preferences that seem obviously bad for a person or disconnected from their status as …. (shrink)

Suppose we assume that the parties in the original position took Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory as constituting their general knowledge of human psychology that survives through the veil of ignorance. How would this change the choice situation of the original position? In this paper, I present what I call ‘prospect utilitarianism’. Prospect utilitarianism combines the utilitarian social welfare function with individual utility functions characterized by Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory. I will argue that, once prospect utilitarianism is on the (...) table, Rawls's original arguments in support of justice as fairness as well as his arguments against utilitarianism are, at best, inconclusive. This shows that how implausible a choice for utilitarianism in the original position is heavily depends on what one assumes to be general knowledge of human psychology that the original contracting parties know. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 5, Page 883-886, October 2022.

This comment seeks to extend the authors' argument by considering how perceived fitness interdependence is generated in different settings. Based primarily on research from political science, it argues that strategic agents may seek to design myths that emphasize not only the longevity of their coalitions, but also internal features such as material and status equality and institutional impartiality.